Introduction

Rachel van ’t Hull - 12179299

The corpus I chose contains all 101 songs from Radiohead’s 9 studio albums, that is Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows, The King of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool. While all of Radiohead’s albums can be labeled as rock, the band has experimented with different sounds along the way, making each individual album to contain a distinct sound in terms of instruments, style and theme, which makes the corpus very fit for a computational musicological research.

Though each album carries a distinct feel, the songs within an album often range from quiet to grunge. For example, perhaps Radiohead’s most famous song, Creep, has a very different sound from the rest of grunge album Pablo Honey. For The Bends, whereas Fake Plastic Trees is a soft and calm song, My Iron Lung returns to hard-rock sounds. On the other hand, Paranoid Android is very typical for OK Computer, containing the “sci-fi” sounds present throughout the album. Furthermore, while most albums are made in different phases of the band’s style, the album Amnesiac in general has very similar sounds to Kid A as they were recorded during the same sessions.

The variation in both Radiohead’s different albums as well as the individual songs within an album makes it interesting to not only analyze how Radiohead’s style has evolved over time, but also see whether a computational model regards songs from different albums as similar. For both these questions, the factors contributing to the outcomes could be very interesting in describing Radiohead’s different sounds within its discography in a computational, musicological manner.

Comparing the albums 1

For this visualisation, the loudness and tempo of the songs were normalized. Valence and energy seem to follow almost exactly the same trend throughout the albums: a fall from Pablo Honey until Amnesiac, followed by a rise until The King Of Limbs, to fall again in A Moon Shaped Pool. loudness also follows this pattern from Kid A onwards, but at first rises from Pablo Honey until Kid A.

Tempo differs from the other trends the most. What is especially striking is that while energy falls from Pablo Honey until Amnesiac, the tempo rises. The opposite holds from the change between Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief and the change between The King Of Limbs and A Moon Shaped Pool. Only from Hail To The Thief until The King Of Limbs, all 4 variables align.

Comparing the albums 2

The saddest album appears to be the band’s most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool, clearly having both the lowest valence as well as the lowest energy, and also being the second most quiet. The King Of Limbs, seems to be the happiest album, being the highest in valence and the second highest in energy.

Furthermore, Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows are almost exactly the same concerning valence, energy, with loudness only differing a tiny bit. In Rainbows being the album that followed up Hail To The Thief could be the explanation for this, however the albums are more than 4 years apart.

While most albums are some distance apart in the graph, the maximum and minimum values of valence and energy are only about 0.30 and 0.25 apart, respectively. To make more meaningful claims about the differences between individual albums, the songs in each album are to be taken into account.

Comparing individual songs

Comparing songs within each album

Most songs within an album are somewhat centered around one or two points of energy and valence (especially around low valence and medium energy), some more obvious than others. Exceptions are Hail To The Thief and The King Of Limbs, where energy and valence differ most throughout each individual song.

Happiest song

Previous visualizations, suggest that 15 Steps is the “happiest” radiohead song when considering valence and energy. To further look into what makes the song sound relatively happy, we can look into the chromatic features of the song using a chromagram. The chromagram pictured here uses a Euclidean norm.

Saddest song

Whereas 15 Steps is the happiest song, True Love Waits is the saddest according to its energy and valence values. The chromagram pictured here uses a Euclidean norm.